Adventures in Adjunct Teaching

A potentially life-threatening condition, five days of excruciating pain, and emergency surgery bring a sharp new focus to life. From a hospital bed at the Mayo, I emailed the new chair that I will not be back after this summer session.

Actually, the message wasn’t quite that blunt and did leave some wriggle room to come back in the spring. But realistically, it ain’t gonna happen.

Online courses tend to insulate you from student insolence and nerviness, but that hasn’t happened this summer. A week or so into the summer’s seven-week course, along comes a message from a student:

Hello

What is the book that will need for this course because i am planing to rent to save some money

Code for “I have no intention of getting the book if I can possibly avoid it.”

You understand, what the kid is saying is that he hasn’t read the course’s introductory announcement — which was posted and made available five days before the course’s start date! — nor, of course has he read the syllabus, over which they have taken a quiz. How does he expect to go through a 100% online course without reading the regularly posted announcements and instructions? By mental telepathy?

May 25, 2015 at 6:00am

It’s listed in the syllabus, with the ISBN, near the top of page 1. Please download the syllabus to get that information. Find the syllabus in Files (in the list on the left-hand side of the Canvas pages). I think you can rent it through the bookstore and also through various other vendors.

Note that the first announcement of the semester told them how to find the syllabus and said a) they need to download it to get the information about the course and b) they would take a quiz over the syllabus to be sure they read it. For good measure, that announcement noted that the syllabus was also attached to the announcement itself. So evidently the fellow hasn’t even bothered to read the online course’s FIRST announcement!!!!!!

A student turns in a 750-word research paper. The assignment states clearly that three sources are required, at least two of which must come from one of the college’s databases of scholarly journals or academic books. Sources must be cited in-text and documented following MLA style. Her paper, evidently recycled from a high-school English class, contains one reference: to a post from the online incarnation of Glamour Magazine.

She is infuriated when she flat-out flunks the paper.

I know writing essays is definitely not one of my greatest strengths but if I can receive some feedback about my grade, that would be great.:

Uh huh. It would be great if you could learn to punctuate a sentence, too. This remark comes after an insulting rant, by the way. The paper was returned to her laden with (time-sucking!) comments, corrections, and advice installed using Word’s “Track Changes” function. Evidently she hasn’t even looked at it.

To see feedback about your paper’s issues, try opening the attachment in the returned assignment and reading what I had to say about it.

They DON’T EVEN BOTHER TO LOOK AT THE GRADED PAPER AND READ THE ADVICE YOU TAKE YOUR LESS-THAN-MINIMUM-WAGE TIME TO WRITE OUT IN DETAIL!!!!!!!!!

Now she begins to sound like one of those animated cartoons people put on YouTube (for example, this classic), detailing the joys of teaching lower-divisiion students:

I don’t understand how a few mistakes on using sources and MLA format results in a loss of 120 points? That is so extreme.

As I lay in a hospital bed doped to the teeth on morphine, this message floats over the ether that is the Internet…

While MLA formatting was an issue, it was not the sole or most significant issue. As stated in the grading rubric and my comments, the key issue is a lack of support from credible sources in your essay. On the one hand, you make claims in the essay and do not include support for them. I have noted such places in the detailed feedback that I provided. On the other hand, when you do include support, it is from a magazine, which is not considered credible for academic research.

The kid capitulates. But I’m sure that’s temporary: two more sets of papers are due in the next couple of weeks. So no doubt it’s not the last we’ll hear from that one.

BTW, lest the observations in that last missive seem out of the blue, the class has now done EIGHT QUIZZES over reading material designed to teach them what a “credible” source is and why Glamour doesn’t make it as a scholarly source, over rudimentary research methods, over citation and documentation, over how to approach and organize a scholarly writing project, and over how to do the specific assignment, a causal analysis.

Averaged over 12 months, my net pay when I’m carrying the maximum load the district allows is a grandiose $1,120 a month. Do I really need to put up with this kind of guff for that kind of pay?

Well. No.

Literally no. A survey of my credit-union checking and savings accounts shows I have enough to provide me with over $2,000 a month before Social Security payments from now until the end of the year. It is in fact objectively true that I do not need to put up with this kind of guff.

In 2015, I will be required to take my first RMD from my IRA, so that the government can shear me for taxes on retirement savings. Thus it will be to my advantage to forego pay on two sections (which is all I was assigned in the fall). I don’t actually earn enough from teaching to pay taxes, but a $45,000 RMD will jack up the apparent income, even though most if it will simply be rolled over into taxable investment instruments. If push comes to shove, I can always take a few thousand dollars from that RMD to live on.

The amount the college pays me comes to about 2 percent of my total retirement savings.

Do I want to live on savings when there’s some chance I could last another 20 years?

Of course not.

On the other hand, at the rate I’m going, it’s beginning to look like “another 20 years” is not in the cards. One would certainly hope not, anyway…

I now have had six surgeries over the course of a year, one of them for a life-threatening condition. Whatever time is left to me, I do not want to spend on a minimum-wage activity that makes me crazy.

For years, I’ve been advising adjuncts to QUIT DOING THIS. Finally I’m taking my own advice.

So how do I propose to supplement Social Security with enough cash to put food on the table?

I’ll tellya how I’m going to supplement Social Security: by writing pornography.

A long-time friend of mine recently learned that a friend of her son’s is cranking $30,000 a month by churning out 5,000-word novelettes and posting them on Amazon. He aims to publish one a day — some of these he writes himself, some he farms out to freelances for — yes! — sub-minimum wages. He’s been at it for about a year, With 256 tomes online, that is what he’s earning.

Well. I certainly don’t need to earn 30 grand a month. Thirty grand a year would more than suffice. And after looking into it, I see that many people are doing this and reporting revenues that amount to a living wage, once a certain “critical mass” of published drivel is reached. Most of them are publishing several 5,000- to 10,000-word pieces of erotica a month and finding that after about six months they begin to see money in the bank. I’ve read the stuff — most of it is execrably written, some of it exactly at the level of a freshman comp student. I’ve written a 7,200-word story and sent it off to a couple of writing friends to review. It was easy to scribble and even kind of fun.

Even if you think you enjoy teaching intransigent, bored freshmen who resent taking your course on general principle,* it remains foolish and self-destructive to do it for starvation wages. When you let yourself be exploited, you are exploited. It comes under the heading of “lying down like a doormat.” This kind of treatment would not happen if the hobbyists and the forlorn of hope would stand up and refuse to be walked on.

If you’d like to see how this new enterprise turns out, my S-corp will spin off a new imprint, Camptown Races Press. It will have a blog, Camptown Ladies Talk, which will announce new bookoids with links to their Amazon pages. As soon as I get time and physical strength to put those names online, I will do so. Watch this space for the links.

And so, my friends, away!

* Nothing personal: they just don’t see why they should be made to take yet another year of English comp skills. And they’re right. If they haven’t got it yet, they’re not going to get it.

Exceptionally good group of students in this summer’s seven-week section. Nary a one of them is giving off any “loser” sparks, and most of them not only are pretty articulate but also appear to be interesting, alert, and lively characters. And one person has already done ALL THE READING(!) and passed all 11 quizzes on the chapters with scores of 100%. Wow!

Several people filed last week’s two assignments early. That’s always nice, because it means I can read things at a relatively leisurely pace, rather than having to turn around a whole section’s worth of papers in two days. Only three papers were turned in after I read the ones on the server yesterday evening. That would mean three of them were working very late at night.

If this continues, all or almost all of them will have a good shot at completing the course. In the community college context, that’s some kind of miracle.

Really, presenting these de rigueur lower-division gen-ed courses in short form makes a great deal more sense than forcing students to sit through sixteen weeks of boredom in classes that they think they don’t need and shouldn’t have to take. Because they have to focus to pass the thing, you get a lot better attention from them, and a lot fewer personal and work catastrophes are likely to happen to any given student in seven weeks than will befall the typical person in sixteen.

In fact, the District has a “college” that’s mostly online. It deploys a University of Phoenix-like schedule in which online courses are quite short and students proceed through them at their own pace. Don’t know whether this allows a student to get through two years of lower-division coursework any faster than sitting through four sixteen-week semesters, but it stands to reason that, at least for the ambitious types, it could speed things along.

If I could teach nothing but seven and eight-week sections, I’d do it.

And we don’t mean “plagiarize.” We mean “is there ANY sign of life out there? Anywhere?”

LOL! I spoke too soon the other day, as the semester seemed to be winding to a peaceful close. I’m now done with grading papers for three endlessly entertaining sections (some of whose classmates, to my delight, are doing exceptionally well; some of whom are going to survive if it kills us all). Grades are due on Friday. Though in theory all papers are in and graded, experience suggests that’s unlikely to be the case. So I’m waiting till Friday a.m. to post final grades with the Distric t. Gives the little things a chance to review their scores and squawk if they have any questions.

As it develops, ’twas a wise move this semester. What should pop up but a dismayed email from one of my beloved pups: Eeeeeeekkkkk! Why am I flunking when I turned in every single paper on time ogodogodogodogodogodOOOOOOOPUHLEEZE GET BACK TO ME AT THE SOONEST POSSIBLE MOMENT LIKE RIGHT THIS FREAKIN’ VERY INSTANT!

Hm. Why are you flunking? Well dayum. I don’t know. Do you s’ppose it’s because you haven’t turned in a whole passel of the papers? Our honored CMS, Canvas, records not only whether you submitted a response to a given assignment, but whether you did NOT do so. Canvas claims you failed to post eight of the eleven assignments. Baaaad Canvas!!!!

So, what could be going on here? Several possibilities present themselves:

1. I can’t read Canvas’s messages, the ones that say “No submission.”2. Beloved Pup did not actually submit anything and now is trying to wangle an incomplete so as to evade a failing grade.3. Beloved Pup DID submit most of the papers but for some reason they didn’t go through.4. Beloved Pup is crazy.5. I am crazy.

My guess is that 1, 4, and 5 do not apply. Let’s discard those as likely FAILS.

So, what we have left as choices are a) our student is trying to pull a fast one, or b) our student is not trying to pull a fast one.

We have evidence, real and presumptive, in both directions.

a)What? Are you KIDDING me? This is the freaking END OF THE SEMESTER and you haven’t even checked in to see what your grades were or what comments and advice Your Distinguished Professor might have offered to you?

Okay, that’s hyperbolic. But isn’t it a little odd that Beloved Pup didn’t even check in to see his grades and gauge my response to his efforts (if any)? An online course is not a hole into the ground into which you pour assignments. There’s a certain amount of back and forth going on, y’know. You fool around with trying to get the assignment right. I fool around with trying to help you get it right. Sort of like that. It’s circumstantially suspicious that Beloved Pup never noticed the absence of any acknowledgement of his efforts, or even that no grades were posted for said efforts, allll semester long.

On the other hand, anything’s possible. Stupidly assuming that students would KNOW responses to their papers would be posted in Canvas, I naively failed to post Announcements to the effect that papers were graded and comments were online. So…yea verily, if this is the first online course Beloved Pup has taken through Canvas, it may not have occurred to him that he, like a grownup, needed to proactively check in to see what, if anything, was going on.

On the other other hand, Beloved Pup is a grownup: he’s on active duty in the Middle East.

But on the other, other hand, that doesn’t mean much, does it, given the general state of grownups in America.

b) Beloved Pup is stationed overseas. It’s not even faintly out of the realm of possibility that this fact bears heavily on the case.

To cut a long train of thought short: I am not even faintly interested in having to read an entire semester of work, not even for one (1) student no matter now deserving s/he may be, at a point where I believe my work to be done. This is not fair to me for a number of reasons:

1. I am not paid for overtime;2. Adjunct teaching is a side gig for me; I have bigger fish to fry;3. Those fish are surprisingly demanding, being denizens of the Real World;4. Even in the absence of any such fish, I am not interested, even in the faintest way, in having to read an entire semester’s work of worth for some guy who was the one person out of 47 who could not figure out that he needed to check in to the course every now and again.

Amazingly, the semester is already drawing to a close.I’m sure it just started a week ago Monday! Students in all three sections — two of freshman comp and one of magazine writing — are doing exceptionally well. Only a few are under-performing; most are getting their assignments in on time and doing at least a creditable job. More classmates than usual are turning in “A”-level work.

And that is very, very nice. 😉

To tell the truth, about midway through the term I made a change that has made my job a LOT easier and that, paradoxically, seems to have something to do with the classmates’ enhanced performance.

Stealing a page from another instructor’s book, I had developed the habit of asking classmates to write “reading responses” to the assigned chapters in the book. The idea was to get them to go so far as to…well, yes. READ the damn book!

They hate that, of course. And understandably: the book is mind-numbingly boring, and the publisher charges something in excess of $80 for what should be, at best, a $25 paperback. But sadly, the thing does contain pointers and instructions that, once absorbed, will help them to succeed in the course and, one hopes, in future writing projects.

Well, after a few semesters of this strategy, I had come to hate the reading responses, too. There were eleven of the things. About a quarter of the students’ responses to any given RR served only to notify the instructor that their authors had not bought the book at all. Another third or so were exercises in mediocrity. A few of the rest went on at lengths reminiscent of À La Recherche du Temps Perdu. And two or three papers per assignment would show, succinctly and intelligently, that their authors had read the chapter and made a halfway decent attempt at applying its principles to one of the chapter’s attached essays. Reading the stuff had become a tedious chore and a clear waste of time.

So, about midway through the semester, I ditched the remaining RRs and replaced them with machine-graded quizzes.

These were not intended to serve as assessments. Their point was more like that of the annoying online “tests” they make you take to pass some driver’s re-education course you had to take after you got caught speeding on the freeway. The idea was to highlight the key points in each chapter and to give the student a chance to indicate she or he had acquired some grasp thereof. Students had three chances to get the answers right. Quizzes over substantive chapters contained 15 one-point questions; those over what we might call “craft” chapters — “how to write an extended definition,” for example — had five three-point questions. Thus in total they would rack up enough points to make a difference in the final grade, but 165 points (assuming a person aced all 11 quizzoids) wouldn’t overshadow the total 600 points available for the essays & draft materials.

I’d figured this would make my life easier — ELEVEN PILES OF DRIVEL I WOULDN’T HAVE TO READ! — but I had no idea how much easier. To judge by their last set of assignments, suddenly they’re entirely different students. I’d estimate that a good 70 percent of them presented well organized, decently researched, reasonably intelligent arguments. Another 25 percent did…uhm…well…good enough for government work. And only about 5 percent crashed in flames — and in all those cases, it appeared not that the writers were incompetent but that they were lazy: they just hadn’t bothered to do the job.

With those quizzes online, it feels like I’ve hardly worked on the comp courses this semester.

Not so, of course: it took many hours to write the questions and mount them online. Once I’d written quizzes over the remaining assigned chapters, I went back and wrote more questions to cover the chapters for which they’d already done RRs: that is, eight twelve-question instruments and three with five questions. It was a lot of work, but evidently it’s helping the students.

And me.

Meanwhile, over in the maga-writing section, only three of the original ten students are turning in responses to any of the assignments. One of these folks is a professional-quality writer whose work would be eminently publishable in national forums. The other two are unarguably “A” students — though I may devote some time to conversing with them, that’s quite different from the soul-crushing job of trying to explain basic literacy to some poor soul who can’t write a grammatical sentence or build a coherent paragraph.

I kind of doubt the college will let the magazine writing course go again. Really, what a waste of the district’s resources to pay to instruct 30 students when only three participate. I almost feel guilty for accepting the money. As for the comp courses, turning the busywork into machine-graded DIY learning “quizzes” lifts so much dreary labor off my shoulders that it almost feels like $2400 is fair pay for the work I’m doing.

We’ll find out this summer, when I have a seven-week online comp course. We’ll recycle the quizzes, replacing all of the reading responses. And that will mean only the essays and the prewriting exercises for them will have to be graded! And six papers is a far cry from 17…

Okay, so all my courses are now online. That’s good, because it saves me the unpaid time entailed in driving back and forth to campus, delivers a hefty saving on gasoline, and obviates my having to put up with the ubiquitous rudeness and bad manners in the classroom.

It adds a challenge, because it means I can’t explain things face to face when it becomes obvious that one or more students can’t understand something. Nor can I try to transmit the information in the textbook, which they refuse to read and which some decline to buy or rent at all, by regurgitating the chapters in so-called “lectures.” And that means they’re flying blind when they go to write the essays required by the District for the course.

A couple of semesters ago, I decided to try remedying the problem by asking them to write “Reading Reviews.” For each chapter, they were asked to synopsize the contents and then to apply the principles in the chapter to one of the readings tacked on to the chapter. Thus, for example, if they were studying Aristotelian rhetoric, they were to show where the various elements described by Aristotle appear in the given reading.

This worked to force some — not all — of them to go so far as to read the book.

However, it has several drawbacks:

• Some students will not read the book at all. They look at the chapter title, guess at its contents, and present that guess as their synopsis. For the application, they either have nothing to say or it’s all hot air and bullshit.

• Some cannot read it. They evidently do the best they can, but their best is extremely weak. It’s clear they made an effort, but they don’t recognize what part of the content represents the significant points. What they produce as a summary is incoherent, jumbled, and utterly confused.

• Some can and do read it well. For those classmates, the whole exercise is a waste of time, because they would have read the assignment without having it force-fed to them.

It is a gigantic time-suck for me. A gigantic, tedious time-suck. Even after cutting the number of chapter readings from 13 to 11, reading all that garbage is a time-suck that won’t quit.

Exacerbating said basic fact is that I have to front-load the course with a passel of the things, because the students need to have read a fair amount of the book’s content before they begin to write their first assignment. To do that while also giving them enough time between writing assignments to do the required research, in some weeks I have to assign two or three annoying busywork projects, which means I have to read two or three of them.

At one point this semester, three sets of them hit the server at the same time. Each section has 22 classmates. Well.

22 x 2 x 3 = 132 mind-numbing pieces of drivel to read!

Even though I don’t assess them on the basis of writing skills — all I’m doing is looking at them to see if they seem to have actually read the assigned chapter — that alone takes time. Clickety-clickety-clickety-clicking to get into their assignment takes time. Reading it takes time. Entering a score and a brief comment takes time. If the work appears to be wanting, entering a reason for the low score takes even more time.

Consider: if each upload takes only two minutes to read, on average, those 132 papers consumed 4.40 hours of my weekend — more than half a day that I could have been doing higher-paid work for my clients, or, far more important in my book, simply enjoying life.

In reality, enough of them score less than the possible 15 points to push the average download/read/comment/upload time to as much as five minutes apiece. In that case…

132 papers x 5 minutes reading time / 60 min. per hour = 11 hours!

Think of that: ELEVEN HOURS diddled away on an exercise whose purpose is to make lazy or weak students do the most basic work in a mickey-mouse freshman course, a job that ought to be a given for college-level students.

As I was plodding through this pile of crap, I decided I am never gonna do this again!

Well, I can’t very well have them just turn in three papers and be done with it. That would, alas, not be pedagogically sound, and if the department found me pulling a stunt like that, I would forthwith be canned. Much as I could do without the crass exploitation of adjunct teaching, as a practical matter the piddling pay is just enough to keep the proverbial wolf from the door. And speaking of doors, I’d just as soon not spend my time greeting Walmart shoppers.

Enter Canvas, with its easy-to-use true/false-multiple-guess quiz function, much easier and faster and saner than Blackboard’s.

On reflection, I took it into my hot little brain to convert all eleven reading reviews to T/F-MG’s.

Four chapters remain for the present herd to read this semester, so I sent out an announcement deep-sixing the RRs, and then as fast as I could, wrote and posted four quizzes to replace the defunct synopsis/application scribbles.

The problem is, this also is a painfully time-consuming task. About two-thirds of the chapters require fifteen questions to cover the content in anything resembling a thorough, vaguely meaningful way. For three of them, which cover craft and are short, I can get away with asking five questions.

Sifting through one of the more complex, longer chapters and coming up with machine-gradable questions that require the student to do more than rest her eyes on a line of the text’s type and yet are free of ambiguity is no easy trick. It takes upwards of two hours to cook up each of these quizzes, and then getting it into Canvas takes another 40 minutes.

As far as I can tell, Canvas creates an answer bank based on unpublished quizzes, but so far I haven’t managed to find a question bank. The answers in the answer bank don’t seem to appear in any organized way — or if there’s a pattern, as yet it has escaped me. So rather than scrolling through hundreds of random answers, it’s easier and faster to copy and paste both the questions and the answers out of Word. FOR EACH SECTION!

This activity, as you can imagine, is brain-bangingly tedious: copying four to six answers, line by line by line by line by line by line by line…holy God!

Whereas you can copy a whole course from one Canvas shell into the other, you apparently can’t copy one feature from course A to course B, at least not if course B is actively online. I thought there was such a function, but no amount of searching the manual and Google revealed it.

The only thing that keeps me going is the hope that once it’s over, it will bring a permanent end to having to ride herd on anything so stupid as forcing them to read the damn textbook.

To ameliorate the effects of the publisher’s infuriating habit of issuing new, scrambled editions every couple of years by way of maximizing opportunities to fleece the students with new textbooks, I have not tied the titles of the quizzes to chapters. Instead, they cover subject areas. Since the Seyler text, which is the one we’re required to use, is anything but original in its organization, approach, or content, there’s a good chance that, say, a discussion of Aristotelian rhetorical terms will be the same whether they appear in this year’s chapter 4 or next year’s chapter 6. This, I hope, will minimize the need to shuffle questions around every time the greedy bastards come out with a new edition.

Once all eleven quizzes are online, I’ll never have to read another piece of busywork again, and with any luck I’ll never have to write any new quizzes.

Canvas will give classmates three chances and keep their highest score, and it will let them peek at the answers as they go. So the thing will work like one of those aggravating “tests” you have to take for driver re-education after you get caught on a traffic camera, by making you go over and over a question until you get it right. To the extent that such an annoying strategy has a teaching function, then, we could possibly argue that these quizzes actually serve a pedagogical purpose: students will have to at least look at the text’s contents to get anywhere on the quiz, and they’ll at least have a shot at directing their attention to the points in the text that matter.

So I’m putting myself through a great deal of suffering and tedium to avoid even more suffering and tedium in future semesters.

I am looking for some blogs that accept guest posts. I am working with an organization that supports students in the academics. I would like to write for blogs and wish to get it published. Your blog looks good and I loved the way you have maintained it. I would like to write on any topic that suits your blog. If you are interested in guest post by me, please let me know it.

Also I need to have one link from your blog to my website, http://nnnnnn.com/, either in the content or in author bio.

Looking forward to the reply.

Regards,

Elizabeth Moss

What “Elizabeth” (undoubtedly not her or his real name) wants is to submit a paid guest post that will contain what is known as a “paid link.” The link, which I’ve redacted here, is to an outfit that provides term papers in exchange for cash.

“Elizabeth” is a low-level freelance writer who works for outfits that do black-hat SEO: they use questionable strategies to raise the visibility of a website in Google searches. Most of these strategies violate Google’s terms of service; Google deploys bots that seek out paid links, and when one appears, Google will simply drop the offending site from its search results. If you have a money-making site, this will destroy your business.

Buying paid links is a very sleazy practice, especially when you pretend that all you’re trying to do is publish a guest post for the purpose of publishing your innocent little site. But when you go to the link she wants to post, you find her client is a term paper vendor: they hire bottom-feeders like “Elizabeth” to write papers for students, for a stiff fee.

Don’t buy term papers from creeps like this – or from anyone else. What they produce is garbage. You may get a C on such a paper, but that is not worth what you will pay for the thing, and it certainly is not worth compromising your personal integrity.

Notice that this writer is not a native speaker of English. S/he is probably Eastern European: “supports students in the academics” is a dead give-away. And “to write for blogs and wish to get it published” would not be literate in any language.

What you get when you pay for one of these things is bad writing. Often the same content has been sold to someone else, making it vulnerable to TurnItIn’s software. That in turn makes you vulnerable to a failing grade in the course. Some schools go so far as to expel students for cheating of this nature.

Funny about Money does not publish black-hat SEO (at least, not knowingly). Normally I forward requests like this to my advertising agent, who either finds a way to extract a substantial amount of money in exchange for something that will fly past Google’s radar or tells the solicitor to go away. In this case, I told “Elizabeth” to take a flying *** at the moon.

That’s exactly what you should do if you are ever approached by a vendor who tries to sell you a term paper.

Sometimes the nearly dream job leaves one imagining adjunct teaching is a good deal.

Dunno about that. But just now am thinking two more sections, paid at university rates, would trade off x(y+z) amount of sh!twork for a mere x amount, leaving time for at least a few hours of creative work a week.

At the rate I’m going, spending eight or nine hours a day in the dreariest kind of scutwork that crowds out that many hours of paying work, I’m sure not getting time to do what I want to do: write.

Every now and again you get a student, even in a junior-college class, who is SO good and SUCH a type-A doobie that you want to fall to your knees and kiss the ground beneath the desk on which the kid does homework.

I suppose it’s those classmates who keep you going.

The other day, a straight-A student from the online 102 section emailed me, having worked herself up to a fine frenzy. Some unnamed family problems have distracted her from working on the final, giant research paper, and now she knew she wouldn’t be able to do her best on it. In fact, she was afraid it would be pretty half-baked. Would I please bear in mind that she didn’t MEAN to turn in a half-baked paper?

So I wrote back: Don’t worry about it, kid.

The subtext, never articulated of course, was Kid! You write circles around even the best of your colleagues in this course. Enter your name at the top of the file and turn in the rest of it blank, and you’ll still pass.

She’s not assuaged. Shortly comes another worried message: Would I try to estimate what her final score would be if she flunks the paper?

This is easy enough: there’s only one more graded paper due, plus an extra-credit exercise.

I toss 60 points into the column for the final nightmare paper, figuring a D is about as low as this one is capable of going. This puts her final score in the mid-C range.

Then I remember that it’s a 200-point assignment. So I double the ordinary D to the D on steroids, 120 points. Now she comes out with a semester grade of around 85%.

Got that? This kid could fail the final paper ABYSMALLY and still score a firm C in the course. A D-minus on the main product would give her a solid B for the semester.

That’s because she’s turned in every assignment; she’s done every busywork project conscientiously enough to get full credit; and she’s managed high A’s for the two required 750-word research papers.

If you’re reasonably verbal, scoring a high Aon one of these little projects is not very hard. Though I have a pretty thorough-going set of rubrics that cover all the District’s desired skill sets and then some, I keep the points-off values pretty low for fine details like spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Otherwise, half the class would fail.

The community colleges are awash in students from low-SES K-12 schools and native speakers of languages other than English. Many of them have never written a researched document (or, as far as one can tell, many documents of any kind) and can barely eke out a coherent paragraph. My job is not to flunk these people. My job is to foster success, and so I lay more emphasis, by far, on organization, logical thinking, and research skills than on stylistic details. You can get a B on a paper that is adequately researched, correctly cited and documented, structured logically and convincingly, and free of fallacies, factual errors, plagiarism, and general stupidity — and never mind whether you can make your verbs agree with your subjects.

Still, as easy as it seems for those of us who are reasonably verbal (the types who spend their spare time writing blog posts, for example…), a good third to half of these students have a difficult time cranking out a halfway decent paper. Most of them fail to turn in a fair number of the small assignments whose unannounced purpose is to provide them with enough points to pass the course even if they CAN’T spell their own names.

You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff I’ve seen this semester:

•750 words presented in one paragraph (hey! one paper, one paragraph, eh?)• Papers that don’t even come close to fitting the assignment, transparent reboots of essays turned in for other courses• A paper copied and pasted, whole cloth, from an open-source textbook• Another paper from the same student, who is one who can barely spell her own name, evidently written by a hired term-paper hack• Content so illiterate you can’t figure out what its author meant to say• Reading reviews that show no indication that the author even looked at the passages under review• Paper after paper that does not address the assignment at all, but rather reviews a different chapter from the one specified (if it’s “reading review #4,” it MUST be about chapter 4, right?)

And on and on.

And there you have it: the reason an adjunct flies into an orgasmic flight when one student shows she can write all of 2½ double-spaced pages coherently and with stylistic accuracy and, of all things, even manages to address all (not some) of the assignments competently.

The other day, I called my gynecologist’s office to ask if she could recommend a plastic surgeon with whom I might consult about a proposed mastectomy (the breast issue is being dealt with at the Mayo Clinic; my gynecologist, one of the rare doctors whom I happen to trust, is “in the wild”: i.e., not with the Mayo). After considerable jabber with the telephone gate-keeper, I explained for the third time that it looked like I was going to have to have a mastectomy, that I do not want reconstruction, that my surgeon is pressuring me for reconstruction, and that I’d like to consult with a plastic surgeon who is not with the Mayo.

“Is that a pelvic procedure?” the young-sounding woman asked.

“No, dear,” I said, unwittingly condescending in my astonishment — was I speaking with a child? “They’re going to chop my boob off.”

“Oh,” she said. After the briefest of pauses, she resumed: “How do you spell that?”

You have got to be one of my students, I thought.

Back-office staff in doctors’ offices usually have at least an AA. Many have the BA. This, then, presumably was a college graduate who wondered if a mastectomy is a pelvic procedure.

Think of that.

Well, what I think is that this is yet another result of short-changing the educational system.

The practice of replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts is also a consequence of short-changing the educational system. And in my opinion the outcome is exactly what we see here: young people who are so ill-educated they’re not fit to be sitting at a desk in an office.

Many adjunct faculty, of course, are dedicated and highly competent. Many are not: we’re not paid to be either dedicated or especially competent. At pay rates that work out to less than minimum wage after grading and course prep are factored in — especially in writing-intensive face-to-face courses — we have more incentive to cut corners and rubber-stamp students along than we do to spend extra hours tutoring kids whose vocabulary is at the middle-school level. With no office space, no phone, no campus-based computer, and often not so much as a locker to hang a jacket in, we are simply not equipped to deliver real teaching to students who need extra attention. Or to any students, in my opinion.

The community colleges are awash in students who need real teaching. Yet the community colleges hire the lion’s share of adjuncts — at my district, for example, now the largest in the country, 80 percent of the faculty is adjunct.

Colleges and universities short-change employees and students for a simple reason: increasingly legislatures short-change education.

When education is shorted, as this case vividly demonstrates, business is shorted.

When business is shorted, America is shorted.

There is simply no way a US industry can compete in the global economy when employees can’t even define or spell the names of the industry’s services and products.

That’s why the issue of adjunct hiring is a business problem.It’s not just an education problem. It’s not just the problem of a few legions of PhD’s and MA’s who were foolish enough to pursue advanced degrees in the humanities (and in psychology, and in anthropology, and in art, and in music, and in the STEM disciplines…). It is America’s problem.

And it’s a very serious problem.

After three books, one of them a best-seller, emitted through mainline publishers, my first effort at self-publishing has gone live at Amazon! Slave Labor: The New Story of American Higher Education describes the predicament of America’s large and growing contingent faculty and shows what it is like to spend a semester in a classroom as an adjunct.

I hope you’ll take time to buy it and to recommend it to your business, community, and political leaders.

College Students: Are You Getting What You Pay For?

If you are attending a college or university or if you have a child in college, you need to read this book.

As a college student, or as a student’s parent, you face endless tuition increases. Do you know what that tuition is buying — and not buying?

Some 80% of college instructors are not professors at all, but underpaid, often underqualified part-time adjuncts. Fewer and fewer American students get what they pay for when they arrive on a college campus. Meanwhile, graduate programs churn out thousands of would-be college faculty with master’s and doctoral degrees, few of whom ever land full-time jobs in education.

Quality of higher education drops as full-time faculty disappear and are replaced by part-timers with no infrastructure, low pay, no benefits, and no representation.

This book explains the short- and long-term effects of replacing professors with part-timers and chronicles one adjunct’s semester in America’s largest community college district.

We’re about two-thirds of the way through this semester’s online Eng. 102 course and a week or so into the online magazine writing course, Eng. 235.

Feeling pretty pleased with the 235s. One of them is exceptionally talented, a clear writer, thorough, and well organized. The rest are doing OK. Judging by the first three scores, several of them surely will ace the course and the rest will score decent grades, assuming they turn in all the papers.

Of course, therein lies the problem with community college courses, especially those presented online: typically a third to half of them will drop before the term ends. Many who drop would do all right if they could hang in there, but for one reason or another they either have to drop (economic or family pressures) or choose to do so (discouragement, distraction, changes of plan).

One of the 235s has failed to submit any of the three assignments. Three refrained from sending in the first significant assignment, thereby dropping 100 points. That’s four of the twelve enrolled students: a third of them in danger of failing or withdrawing.

Of the 102s, nineteen of the original twenty-one are still on the roll. One has turned in three of the thirteen assignments due so far; one is missing five of the assignments; one is missing four. Still, only one is actually flunking, because the course has so many assignments, most of which are low-value scores. If eighteen of twenty-one students are still hanging in there, with only one major assignment and three busyworks (out of 12) coming due, that is not bad at all.

Another challenge, of course, arises from our students’ often weak academic skills. Some show up in the second-semester freshman comp course with reading skills so weak they don’t seem to be able to parse out the instructions for how to do an assignment, and you wonder how on earth they managed to get through the first semester. One suspects, especially in the cases of those who’ve tried several times, that they retake the course until they encounter some instructor who takes pity on them.

Two of the 102s’ three essays have come in. One student demonstrated remedial-level skills on the first assignment and then submitted an example of perfectly idiomatic and smoothly edited prose: copied and pasted straight from the Internet. Presumably that also is a way some of them get through 101. 😀

Some of them simply don’t read. Whether it’s because they can’t read is unclear. They must be able to limp through the required assessment tests and remedial courses, so evidently they can comprehend written language at some level. In some cases, I’ve observed, the person shows that she or he understands the meaning of a word in isolation, but when the term is placed in context can’t figure out how it relates to the other words or statements around it.

How exactly that happens is a mystery to me. Possibly the present generation of students is being taught to parse meaning first by memorizing a word’s definition and then by deducing the the rest of the sentence’s sense. That’s how they’re behaving. If it’s so, then it’s exactly the opposite of the way we were taught to interpret meaning, back in the Dark Ages when most kids came out of grammar school with a fair degree of literacy. We learned to guess meaning by context. Sometimes we got it wrong, and if we didn’t come from a higher-SES family we often got the pronunciation wrong (you don’t even want to know how I thought “Beethoven” was pronounced!). But most of the time we figured it out.

Too many of the classmates who come my way can’t figure it out on their own. And that’s worrisome.

Oh well. I can’t solve the problems of the world. The best I can do is try to help the present flock make its way through the courses and hope they somehow manage once they get out into the world.

Some of these students should be in face-to-face sections. But from my own point of view, I can’t see ever teaching in the classroom again, unless it’s for a very short-form summer session. With all the surgery I’ve had — four since the end of last June — if I’d had to show up on the campus this semester, I would have lost my job.

Such as it is.

The online format has made it possible for me to run two sections in spite of repeated surgeries that have disrupted my business and my daily life. The piddling pay for the courses has kept the Mayo Clinic from completely draining my checking account.

Next semester the journalism program’s director wants to drop the magazine writing course’s textbook, which is like all textbooks absurdly overpriced, and replace its content with readings on the Internet.

That will pose a problem, because it’s going to involve a lot of work. And if I end up undergoing more surgery during the winter break, a distinct possibility, I can’t even begin to imagine how I’m going to find the time and energy to rewrite the entire course using a scattering of websites to undergird the content. It’s going to be a real bitch.